Eyewitness Reports from Japan's Ongoing Disaster

Author and PM contributor Carl Hoffman traveled through devastated towns on Japan's ravaged coastline in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami. His firsthand reports reveal the almost unimaginable extent of the damage and the ongoing rescue operations that continue against all odds.

The morning of March 11th was cold and gray for residents of Honshu, the main island of Japan.

That afternoon, Masako Unoura Tanaka and her 70-year-old aunt drove through downtown Kesennuma. Nine miles up the coast, Monty Dickson, a 26-year-old English teacher from Alaska, stood in the city hall of Ofunato. Tayeko Chiba, 70, was tucked in her house, perched high above the sea in the fishing village of Oshiro. Then, at 2:46 pm, 45 miles offshore, the earth's tectonic plates shifted beneath the ocean. The fifth most powerful earthquake ever recorded rumbled for six long minutes, then quieted.

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The quake itself did little damage. Dickson's girlfriend, 80 miles west in Yamagata, called him on his cell phone. "I'm fine!" Dickson said. But then tsunami warnings sounded throughout Japan's coastal towns and cities. Tanaka knew to seek higher ground, but getting there wasn't a simple matter because of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Dickson had no car, and the City Hall building stood in a wide coastal plain, thickly built up as all Japanese cities are.

Chiba wasn't too worried. The fishing village of Oshiro is a tight jumble of houses on a mountainside in a picture-perfect cove, and the village is behind a 36-foot-high, 12-foot-wide concrete seawall. Chiba's house was high above that. Japan has spent billions on seawalls and those walls— sometimes double layers of them, like Maginot Lines—stood guarding her coastal cities.

Thirty minutes later, the water rolled in. Some people here say there were four waves, others five. A single cubic foot of water weighs 64 pounds. The number of cubic feet of water that poured into Ofunato, Kesennuma, Oshiro and every town along the coast was incomprehensible. The ocean washed over Oshiro's seawall, toppled sections of it like dominoes and filled Chiba's living room, drowning her 90-year old mother. Monty Dickson has not been heard from nor seen again. Tanaka (who was 5 in 1960 when the Chile earthquake and tsunami struck) and her aunt abandoned the car, raced up the stairs of a six-story building to its roof—with water nipping at their waists—and huddled with nothing but two boxes of chocolates and a sheet through a night of snow and rain.

Ten days later, Kesennuma, Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Oshiro and dozens of others are in ruins. To be human is to build—think of the Egyptian pyramids—and to seek order and permanence. But to witness the destruction is to see our hubris—the steel building no more permanent than the anthill. In Rikuzentakata a 75-foot-tall wall of water roared four miles inland up a narrow river valley. A city of 26,000, is gone; 3600 houses obliterated. A highway overpass runs through town at a height of 20 or 30 feet, and tall steel signs on it were submerged and bent like hot wax. Its mayor, Tuba Futoshi, is still missing his wife and son, even as he tries to run what's left of the town and holds quiet news conferences.

After the tsunami struck Saitama City, Fire Bureau fireman Takehiro Shimamura was one of the first to begin the monumental task of rescue and recovery. He and 200 colleagues drove straight to Rikuzentakata; the usually 6-hour drive took 18. "Along the river, there was no one alive," he says. "People were just in shock, crying with their mouths open." A day later, urban search and rescue teams from Fairfax, Va., Los Angeles and the UK arrived. They marked every destroyed house or upside-down car with a date and a circle. They were looking for the living, but the living have been found and they've gone home. Shimamura and company continued the grisly task, though, combing the wreckage foot by foot with long poles and sleeping in tents in a parking lot on high ground. "It is," he says, "important work."

A few miles up the coast, Ofunato is a surreal picture of apocalypse. Block after block is rubble and mud and crushed, overturned cars and trucks. Steel girders bent and dismembered as if they were no more than toothpicks. The smell of dampness and plaster and dead fish. This is Ofunato today: a teddy bear. A television. Men's ties blowing in a few standing trees. A family photo album. Nothing but scattering pieces of a world that was once all straight lines and tidiness. On the outskirts of town, crews in cherry pickers repair power lines for businesses and houses still standing. But the rest of the city will have to be scooped up and thrown away.

Yet the rescue goes on. There is the sound of crows cawing and heavy equipment crunching through metal and concrete, sifting for the dead. In the shelter of a tent on a city street, firemen look over a map divided into searchable sections and then fan out for another afternoon of looking. A Dutch team with cadaver dogs, Belgian shepherds, climb through the wreckage. After a week of searching the dogs are cut, wet and exhausted—but still doing their job. They bark, Martine Dietz ties a piece of red and white plastic tape to the spot and moves on. Another body for the police to dig out.

Monty Dickson's girlfriend has been here a week looking for him. He's one of 17,000 people still missing in the country. "I still hope I'll find him," she says. It took rescue workers three days to get to Oshiro, Chiba's town. Now, two weeks later, those who are left get their water from a bathtub filled by a fire hose. Chiba has no heat, no power and no first floor. She's living on the second. At City Hall, which was high enough to be spared, there's still no power. Lists of the missing adorn the walls outside. A few more miles north stands the city of Miyako, where the country's largest and most expensive seawall was completed two years ago at a cost of $1.5 billion. It meant nothing. The low-lying parts of Miyako are as devastated as anywhere else.

Here, the unfolding nuclear crisis 150 miles south in Fukushima that has captured the world's attention seems remote, unreal. There's so much rescue to be done that people don't have time to ask the big questions: What happens next? Will Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Oshiro and the other cities be rebuilt? What about all those expensive sea walls? You get no answers. We have to find the missing first, people say. The present overwhelms the future.

Chiba says her husband wants to stay, as Oshiro is his home town, but she wants to leave. She looks at the seawall and says, "We thought we were safe."

At first, Ofunato's mayor says, "We will rebuild." But as the conversation unfolds, he says, "It will be difficult. There was a huge tsunami 100 years ago here. There is a saying that 'disaster happens when people forget.' Maybe we can make new concrete homes in higher places.'"